Greg Egan

eBooks

This page lists eBooks that I have published myself for US readers. They are all currently priced at $2.99, and they are DRM-free (that is, the eBook’s use is not restricted by Digital Rights Management).
For Diaspora, as well as the standard eBook there is an Enhanced Multimedia Edition, for iPads and for Apple computers running Mac OS 10.9 or later.

Readers outside the US have always been able
to buy the Orion/Gollancz eBook editions of my work [which you can find on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, as well as many other outlets] ... but for readers in the US the titles listed here were either out of print for many years or have never been available.

These are not my only works available as eBooks in the US. My later novels, from Incandescence onwards, have been published as eBooks by Night Shade Books (and in 2014/15 Night Shade also
brought out brand new paperback editions of most of my earlier books).
For full details of all these other editions, check my bibliography.

Readers in the Philippines can buy the Amazon Kindle editions of these books, but for some reason iTunes does not currently allow eBooks to be sold in the Philippines.

Quarantine

Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.

No dreams; I simply wake, knowing:

Laura Andrews is thirty-two years old, one hundred and fifty-six centimetres tall,
and weighs forty-five kilograms. Short, straight brown hair; pale blue eyes; a long,
thin nose. Anglo-Irish features and deep black skin; like most Australians, born with
insufficient UV protection, she’s been retrofitted with genes for boosted melanin
production and a thicker epidermis.

Laura Andrews has severe congenital brain damage; she can walk and eat, clumsily,
but she can’t communicate in any fashion, and the experts say that she understands
the world little better than a six-month-old child. Since the age of five, she’s
been an inpatient at the local Hilgemann Institute.

Four weeks ago, when an orderly unlocked her room to serve breakfast, she was gone.
After a search of the building and grounds, the police were called in. They repeated
and extended the search, and conducted a doorknock of the surrounding area, to no avail.
Laura’s room bore no signs of forced entry, and recordings from security cameras proved
unenlightening. The police interviewed the staff at length, but nobody broke down and
owned up to spiriting the woman away.

In 2034, the stars went out. An unknown agency surrounded the solar system with
an impenetrable barrier, concealing the universe from humanity’s gaze.

In 2067, Nick Stavrianos is hired to investigate the
disappearance of a mentally disabled woman, Laura Andrews, from the institution
where she was being cared for. Aided by a skull full of neural modifications,
he follows her trail to the Republic of New Hong Kong, where an organisation known as
the Ensemble has uncovered Laura’s extraordinary secret: an ability that could
transform the world.

Permutation City

Paul uncovered his eyes, and looked around the room.
Away from a few dazzling patches of direct sunshine,
everything glowed softly in the diffuse light: the matte white brick walls,
the imitation (imitation) mahogany furniture; even the posters — Bosch, Dali, Ernst,
and Giger — looked harmless, domesticated. Wherever he turned his gaze (if nowhere
else), the simulation was utterly convincing; the spotlight of his attention made
it so. Hypothetical light rays were being traced backwards from individual rod
and cone cells on his simulated retinas, and projected out into the virtual environment
to determine exactly what needed to be computed: a lot of detail near the centre
of his vision, much less towards the periphery. Objects out of sight didn’t
“vanish” entirely, if they influenced the ambient light, but Paul knew that
the calculations would rarely be pursued beyond the crudest first-order approximations:
Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights reduced to an average reflectance value,
a single grey rectangle — because once his back was turned, any more detail
would have been wasted. Everything in the room was as finely resolved, at
any given moment, as it needed to be to fool him — no more, no less.

Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and
body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than
real time.
He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of
artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and
baling out on him, shutting themselves down.

Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she’s unemployed and running out of money, but
she can’t stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the
Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of
mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”.

Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire
virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular
level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has
to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the
Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish —
a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.

Axiomatic

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my brain, so that the jewel’s teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel’s thoughts were wrong, the teacher – faster than thought – rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could do it for me.

I thought: if hearing that makes me feel strange and giddy, how must it make the jewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: “Exactly the same; it doesn’t know it’s the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel…”

And it too wonders—

(I knew, because I wondered)

— it too wonders whether it’s the real me, or whether in fact it’s only the jewel that’s learning to be me.

Distress

“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”

The bioethicist was a laconic young asex with blond dreadlocks and a T-shirt which flashed up the slogan SAY NO TO TOE! in between the paid advertising.
Ve countersigned the permission form on the forensic pathologist’s notepad, then withdrew to a corner of the room.
The trauma specialist and the paramedic wheeled their resuscitation equipment out of the way, and the forensic pathologist hurried forward, hypodermic syringe in hand,
to administer the first dose of neuropreservative. Useless prior to legal death — massively toxic to several organs, on a time scale of hours — the cocktail
of glutamate antagonists, calcium channel blockers, and antioxidants would halt the most damaging biochemical changes in the victim’s brain, almost immediately.

Andrew Worth is a science journalist with optic nerve taps and a gut full of memory chips. Burnt out after completing a documentary on controversial
developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein
Centenary Conference on the artificial island of Stateless.
There, a young South African physicist, Violet Mosala, is expected to unveil her candidate for a Theory of Everything.

But the assignment is not the tropical respite Worth was expecting. While the politics surrounding the creation of Stateless grows more turbulent,
and ignorance cults stage protests against the gathering scientists,
a secretive group known as the Anthrocosmologists, with some very strange ideas about the Theory of Everything, begin to enact their own agenda.

Diaspora

Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory.

And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta.

Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Buy the Enhanced Multimedia Edition from iTunes.
This version is for iPads and for Apple computers running Mac OS 10.9.
It includes two movies and two interactive widgets (“Why a Sphere Can’t be Flattened” and
“Orbits in 3 and 5 dimensions”). One of the movies is shown below.

Teranesia

Whole organs were displaced from their usual positions, and features conserved across the entire order Lepidoptera were missing, or subtly altered. If all of these changes were due to a barrage of random mutations, it was hard to imagine how the creature could have survived the larval stage, let alone ended up as such a beautifully formed, perfectly functioning adult.

Welcome to Teranesia, the island of butterflies, where evolution has stopped making sense.

Prabir Suresh lives in paradise, a nine-year-old boy with an island all his own: to name, to explore, and to populate with imaginary creatures stranger than any exotic tropical wildlife. Teranesia is his kingdom, shared only with his biologist parents and baby sister Madhusree. The evolutionary puzzle of the island’s butterflies that brought his family to the remote South Moluccas barely touches Prabir; his own life revolves around the beaches, the jungle, and the schooling and friendships made possible by the net.

When civil war breaks out across Indonesia, this paradise comes to a violent end. The mystery of the butterflies remains unsolved, but nearly twenty years later reports begin to appear of strange new species of plants and animals being found throughout the region — species separated from their known cousins by recent, dramatic mutations that seem far too useful to have arisen by chance from pollution, disease, or any other random catastrophe.

Madhusree is now a biology student, proud of her parents’ unacknowledged work, and with no memories of the trauma of the war to discourage her, she decides to join a multinational expedition being mounted to investigate the new phenomenon. Unable to cast off his fears for her safety, Prabir reluctantly follows her. But travel between the scattered islands is difficult, and Madhusree has covered her tracks. In the hope of finding her, Prabir joins up with an independent scientist, Martha Grant, who has come to search for both clues to the mystery and whatever commercial benefits it might bring to her sponsor. As Prabir and Martha begin to untangle the secret of Teranesia, Prabir is forced to confront his past, and to face the painful realities that have shaped his life.

Schild’s Ladder

Cass opened her eyes. Lifting her head to peer through a portal, still strapped to the bed at the waist, she could just make out the Quietener: a blue glint reflecting off the hull a million kilometres away. Mimosa Station had so little room to spare that she’d had to settle for a body two millimetres high, which rendered her vision less acute than usual. The combination of weightlessness, vacuum, and insectile dimensions did make her feel pleasantly robust, though: her mass had shrunk a thousand times more than the cross-sections of her muscles and tendons, so the pressures and strains involved in any collision were feather-light. Even if she charged straight into a ceramic wall, it felt like being stopped by a barricade of petals.

It was a pity the same magical resilience couldn’t apply to her encounters with less tangible obstacles. She’d left Earth with no guarantee that the Mimosans would see any merit in her proposal, but it was only in the last few days that she’d begun to face up to the possibility of a bruising rejection. She could have presented her entire case from home, stoically accepting a seven-hundred-and-forty-year delay between each stage of the argument. Or she could have sent a Surrogate, well-briefed but non-sentient, to plead on her behalf. But she’d succumbed to a mixture of impatience and a sense of proprietorship, and transmitted herself blind.

Now the verdict was less than two hours away.

For twenty thousand years, every observable phenomenon in the universe has been successfully explained by the Sarumpaet Rules: the laws governing the dynamics of the quantum graphs that underlie all the constituents of matter and the geometric structure of spacetime. Now Cass has stumbled on a set of quantum graphs that might comprise the fundamental particles of an entirely different kind of physics, and she has travelled three hundred and seventy light years to Mimosa Station, a remote experimental facility, in the hope of bringing this tantalising alternative to life. The “novo-vacuum” is predicted to begin decaying the instant it’s created, but even a short-lived, microscopic speck could shed light on the origins of the universe, and test the Sarumpaet Rules more rigorously than ever before.

Cass’s experiment turns out to be more successful than anticipated: the novo-vacuum is more stable than the ordinary vacuum around it, and a region in which the new physics holds sway proceeds to expand out from Mimosa at half the speed of light.

Six hundred years later, more than two thousand inhabited systems have been lost to the novo-vacuum. On the Rindler, a ship that has matched velocities with the encroaching border, people have come from throughout inhabited space to study the phenomenon. Most are Preservationists, hunting for a way to turn back the tide, but a few belong to another faction: Yielders, who believe that the challenge of adapting to survive on the far side of the border would reinvigorate a civilisation that has grown stale and insular.

Tchicaya has come to the Rindler to join the Yielders, but when Mariama — a childhood friend whose example inspired him to abandon his own home world and traditions for a life of travel — arrives soon after, he is shocked to discover that she plans to help the Preservationists find a way to destroy the novo-vacuum.

As a theoretical breakthrough leads to a sequence of experiments that begins to reveal the true richness of the world behind the border, tensions between the opposing factions grow. When a splinter group responds to these revelations with violent, unilateral action, Tchicaya and Mariama are forced into an uneasy alliance, and travel together through the border, balancing old and new loyalties against the fate of two incomparably different universes.

Luminous

In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. It never occurred to me to ask why. Though school included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing well enough academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At home, I was free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and particle physics, quaternions and galactic evolution, and to write my own Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And though I was a skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport left me comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own terms. Whenever I ran – and I ran everywhere – it felt good.

I had food, shelter, safety, loving parents, encouragement, stimulation. Why shouldn’t I have been happy? And though I can’t have entirely forgotten how oppressive and monotonous classwork and schoolyard politics could be, or how easily my usual bouts of enthusiasm were derailed by the most trivial problems, when things were actually going well for me I wasn’t in the habit of counting down the days until it all turned sour. Happiness always brought with it the belief that it would last, and though I must have seen this optimistic forecast disproved a thousand times before, I wasn’t old and cynical enough to be surprised when it finally showed signs of coming true.

Oceanic

She stepped forward, then reached down and took his hand. “Do you think you can walk?” Her grip was firm, and her skin was cool and dry. She was completely unafraid; she might have been a good Samaritan in a public street helping an old man to his feet after a fall — not an intruder helping a threat to national security break out of therapeutic detention, at the risk of being shot on sight.

“I’m not even sure I can stand.” Robert steeled himself; maybe this woman was a trained assassin, but it would be too much to presume that if he cried out in pain and brought guards rushing in, she could still extricate him without raising a sweat. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“My name’s Helen.” She smiled and hoisted him to his feet, looking at once like a compassionate child pulling open the jaws of a hunter’s cruel trap, and a very powerful, very intelligent carnivore contemplating its own strength. “I’ve come to change everything.”

Robert said, “Oh, good.”

Oceanic is a collection of twelve stories, including the Hugo-award-winning “Oceanic”: